Home Has Changed A Lot And Not All For The Good

October 29, 1989|By KEITH F. MCLOUGHLAND Book Reviewer

In 1967, the Associated Press sent Mort Rosenblum to the Congo to report a war. For the next two decades he kicked around 145 other countries covering more wars (Vietnam, Biafra, Lebanon, Bangladesh), African famines and assorted foreign affairs. Today an expatriate, or "Europino" as he prefers (so as not to be confused for an ex-patriot), he lives on a boat in Paris.

After 20 years overseas, the Tucson native came to the realization one day that "my own country was about as foreign as any I knew." So, like other Europinos before him (Fenimore Cooper and Henry James come to mind), Rosenblum decided it was time to come back home and take a look around. It was Rip Van Winkle time.

Between 1986 and last fall's presidential campaign, Rosenblum traveled around America, starting his tour in the Big Apple on Liberty Weekend and eventually coming full circle to Washington, D.C. He didn't miss much, except for Florida and us. The report he files is more than mildly depressing, frequently profane, riotously funny and (just when the reader is wondering how one goes about buying a houseboat on the Seine) occasionally uplifting and encouraging.

But mostly depressing. Rosenblum is tough, battle-hardened, clear-eyed and curmudgeonly, but his encounter with contemporary American values, lifestyles, crime, racism, ignorance and indifference left him angry and shaken. If there is a single theme running through this series of vignettes it is this: America is in trouble because its people have stopped caring about little more than themselves.

It probably didn't help that Donald Trump dominated the headlines when Rosenblum hit town. Greed is one of the subjects that weaves its way in and out of his experiences and he seems to find it everywhere: at Dollywood in poverty-stricken Appalachia, in "the God-in-a-box industry of televagelism," among students who (unable to locate the United States on a map of the earth) list huge incomes as their sole goal in life, with the Elvis-peddlers at Graceland and with store-owners at "spendatoriums" (his word for malls) for whom nothing much matters but "the bottom line."

Thus begins a familiar catalog of late 20th century American ills. There is crime: Rosenblum notes that the nation's capital now boasts more than one murder every day. There is the problem of drugs: in the same city, he found kids younger than 10 playing a new schoolyard game - "With crushed chalk, plastic Baggies and Monopoly money, huddling around and acting quickly to foil observation, they play drug dealer." There are guns: "In the United States any psychopath can buy a Saturday night special; he breaks the law only if he drops the sales slip on the ground."

Beyond these problems, which make it into our headlines with some regularity, Rosenblum also found subtler, less newsworthy, but equally disturbing symptoms of a nation at risk: homelessness, hunger, mass hypocrisy, "ingrained racist thinking," an absence of trust, a screwed-up sense of priorities ("In Japan the ratio of graduating engineers to lawyers is 10-to-1. In the United States, it is 1-to-10"), a general lack of civility and passion and a specific lack of leadership ("government by gagwriter"). On a purely personal level, Rosenblum was startled to discover that we had become a nation of "health facists" - "In a newsroom in Warsaw you could not write what you wanted. But you could smoke a cigarette."

And, beneath all of this, he found a smug ignorance and massive indifference toward the rest of the world (which, in some cases, is defined as the neighboring county) and its problems.

Rosenblum concedes that, by the end of his travels, he was frothing at the mouth and beginning to sound like "Dr. Doom." But that doesn't stop him from closing this blood pressure-lifting book with some preaching, especially about the relationship between education and democracy. Which, of course, signals that, after all those years and all those miles, he still cares deeply about home.